electroacoustic music; computer-generated recording.

Music and libretto by Marcus Bittencourt,
based on a story by Vielimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922).
Duration: 1h 46'
Channels: 2

KA is the shadow of the soul. He will be the guide to a kaleidoscopic passage spiced with the dust of Eastern Religions and Myths. KA will bring the Egyptian priests' Sun and reveal the greatness of Ekhnaten, he will bring the Scandinavian Eddas' sea, the earth and the air of a mythological Japan, and the Islam's false prophet. He will bring Christianity's reasoning of Good and Evil, he will reveal ancient China, Pericles's Greece, Addia-Saka's Scythians, the Love of the everyday Man. The centuries are indeed his rocking chair. KA proposes a hallucinatory spiraling descent through the Ages: Time and Space will become one and merge into the Universal, into Death. The whole World will be brought into play as the Orchestra to materialize Khlebnikov’s 1916 work. We shall try to conjure the miracle of Acousmatics: sounds that are normally regarded as non-musical noises will disincarnate from their daily ordinary function of Source Indexes and will be allowed to become Music. KA is a canvas of one hour and forty-six minutes of organized sound, all tempered with a fictitious orientalism generated in laboratory. Strange tuning systems, complex rhythmical methods, new orchestration techniques, all was specially reinvented and designed to evoke non-existent musical civilizations. The electroacoustic medium is used in a unique way to generate a world of deceiving realistic appearance that nonetheless bears the mark of oneiric surrealism. The sounds used are mostly real sounds, recorded in real life, real spoken voices, real people singing, concrete sounds of all sorts and a huge assortment of musical instruments. All was blended, transformed, multiplied, agglomerated, beaten into shapes, all the way from the smallest sound particles up to the actual stretched painted canvas itself by unique computer algorithms specially designed for this project by the composer himself. No live performers are involved in the performance of this work which consists solely on the reproduction of previously recorded sounds. KA is a digital work in stereo. In its concert version, the two audio channels of the work are to be diffused live and spatialized through a realtime digital surround system of eight channels.
The world premiere of KA in its concert version happened on May 19 2002 at Columbia University in New York City. Its first radio broadcast was delivered by WHPK 88.5 FM, Chicago, USA, in December 18th, 2002. The opera was also aired by Rádio USP FM 93.7 MHz, São Paulo, Brazil, during the Paisagem show, divided in two parts in 03/06 and 04/03, 2005.

complete libretto

Recordings: